Far East Movement

The LA group Far East Movement stopped into the store today to get laced in JUMP sneakers.  Check them out at Tenjune tomorrow night.

Shinedown wearing JUMP on the CBS Morning News

Shinedown is an LA based band who’ve sold more than 6 million albums with many #1 hits including, this song, Second Chance.  Zach Myers, the guitarist on the right side of the stage has got on the Volume in White Patent.

LA

When I first started going there, it just felt really superficial and annoying that I couldn’t get around anywhere without driving.  Though the more I’ve started going, the more I’ve grown to appreciate it – the food, the beautiful girls, the weather has begun to take a place in my soul. Maybe when I have kids I’ll move there.

I rented a space at the Connected Showroom to show the JUMP SNEAKER DELUXE Fall line and it definitely was the right place to show. The people, energy, vibe and other brands there were spot on in terms of what JUMP represents. Everything is a scene in LA and fashion certainly is one of them so it was nice to sort of explore that realm out there.

Yuichi and Paquito holdin down Joyrich – another kick ass LA based brand.

It was also dope to reconnect with my homeboy, Sung Kang, whose movie, Fast and Furious 4 comes out next week. From what he’s told me, it’s going to be completely sick and make the third one look like a film school project. We had the chance to talk and I think we have some really cool projects coming down the pipeline.

I also got to meet up with my publicists, American Rebel PR, whom I’ve just begun working with.  Think we’ll do some great things together also.

What I’ve come to realize is that perhaps the most challenging and subsequently most exciting aspect of this gig of building a brand is that there really isn’t any sort of presets in terms of how you’re supposed to do your job.  When I worked on the buying side, there’s a sort of formula or general sort of approach that you take and you just do it and replicate season upon season.  I’m finding that in this game, everything has to always be new and you can’t simply rely on how you did it last season.  There’s so many little moving parts and once you can understand how you can utilize each of these mechanisms and put it together, you get a fully operational super machine, like when the small Transformers all got together to form Ultra Magnus.  Of course, at the end of the day, when you’re product is fresh, all those gears get that extra grease and it almost propels itself.

Jump in LA.

Check us out at Kitson’s new store on Melrose.  I had the chance to stop in a few weeks ago and it’s an amazing space.  Great merchandise.

I never thought our high tops could be worn with shorts but the mannequins at Bloomingdale’s have proved me wrong.

JUMP SNEAKER DELUXE NOW AVAILABLE IN STORES.

If you’re not already aware, JSD has hit stores which means I will be hitting them too.  On December 6th between 2-4 PM, Sung Kang and I will be at Bloomingdale’s in Beverly Center to celebrate the launch of JSD there.  Here’s the invite.

Definitely try to make it as we are very eager to introduce the latest in Sneaker Deluxe to LA.  Also, if you’ve read any of my prior posts you’ll know how cool Sung Kang is.  I’m quite excited to see the man again myself!  JSD is also available in all NYC Bloomingdale’s stores.

Here are some of the styles Bloomingdale’s is carrying.

Note that in LA, we also sell in Kitson who will carry a slighltly different assortment of our line!  Be sure to check us out there as well.  Here’s what they have.

At our other favorite, OAK NYC, our shearling lined high top has landed. It’s amazingly comfortable and of course, great for winter.

Get it at OAK online.

Hope everyone can rock their JSD for the Holidays.  Happy Thanksgiving!!!  Time to roast the turkey!!!

Where to Buy?!

As I’d mentioned in my prior post, our trip to Vegas and LA has been highly successful.  We’ve opened up some really great accounts all over the country but I’m particularly excited because two of my favorite stores will be selling us soon!

Oak, which has locations in Brooklyn and on Bond St. in New York.

Kitson Men which is located on Robertson in LA and is opening up a few other locations.

More to come!

Also, check out a writeup on our collaboration with Sung Kang in Footwear News.

Vegas.

So we’re going back.  As if once a month weren’t enough already – my liver is already trying to hide.

We’ll be at POOL booth #1118 and Project at 12131 12th Ave.

Come say high if you’ll be around.

Which reminds me that I never blogged about the last trip.  Here goes.

We introduced the ads in the trade pubs Footwear News and Footwear Plus.

The good ol’ booth at the convention center where we showed the regular Jump line.

Our suite at the Venetian where we showed Monderer for Jump (to hit our SoHo store soon) and our higher end Jump collection to debut later in the year.

That silver shoe is cut from one piece of Italian leather.

Some kickass mocs.

Sneaker deluxe.

Teaser!

Uncle Harry and shoes for humanity.

It’s become tradition to hit up the same Chinese restaurant every show.  Notice the chicken head.

And the abundance of Tsingtao Beer.

And the chicken head has landed onto Bree’s lips.  She’s our rep in the west.

A Joy, Bree and chicken head triple kiss.

“Now that, I say, that I say was what I call heaven.”

Remember this guy?

I always liked him.  Now this is, I say, is just wrong.

And of course, Larry goes for the coxcomb.

The women of Jump.

The men of Jump.

Our distributor and brother, Daniel and his wife Melanie from Montreal.

Uncle James and Uncle Harry.

Harry loves to perform his psychoanalysis tests during dinner.

Our last night in Vegas.

This is like the megatouch game.

With Jorge of SWEAR shoes.

Lawrence with Stephanie and our German distributor Thuy.

And that was that.  We went to LA after.  We’ll be there again after this trip.

They’ve been published!

The campaign has officially launched.

To start, we are running “Sung Kang in Sneaker Deluxe” in YRB and Vice, both very dope mags.

And I introduce “Sung Kang in Tuxedo Man”.

We are running this one in Marie Claire’s Fall Fashion issue.

The female model is actually Julie LaPlaca, who was once my marketing associate and manager at the store (yes, we hire models).  She has now transported herself to LA to try her hand at fame and fortune.  Having modeled for Jump, she’ll be famous in no time.

!Stay tuned for the rest of the ads and short films!

The Collaboration with Sung Kang.

It was some time last fall when I’d decided to reach out to Sung Kang, a rising actor in Hollywood, most famous for his role as Han in Fast and Furious Tokyo Drift and in Better Luck Tomorrow. It was his iconoclastic approach to portraying Asian Americans as creative, funny and desirable that led me to take a big interest in him. So when he replied to me saying that he’d seen the shoes and loved to get involved with Jump at any level, I knew we were onto something great.

We flew out to LA and had wanted to treat him to lunch at some swanky Japanese restaurant but it ended up him inviting us to his own restaurant, Saketini, in Brentwood. It was pretty immediate that we knew we were speaking with the right person to represent the brand. We shared with him our history: our beginnings in Asia, how the brand has since traveled to over 30 countries and our vision for the US market. We discussed our brand philosophy driven by family values and how we wanted to transcend the realm of mere shoes but to extend the brand to other aspects of culture and global consciousness. We left lunch feeling not only extremely satisfied and full (his food, by the way, is exquisite) but also feeling great about the partnership. It felt like he had already become one of the Jump family. We had some great ideas on the table and from there we knew it would only burgeon into something bigger.

Man, did he feed us. We must’ve gone through like 10 courses.

After our return to New York, we began brainstorming. I soon discovered that contrary to what you might think of most actors, Sung could do a lot more than just act. I suppose the fact that he owned a restaurant and built his own original menu was already a testament to that. He’d become our Hollywood ambassador, wearing our shoes in all his films including Fast and Furious 4 directed by Justin Lin, the prequel to Tokyo Drift that tells the story of Han and Dom, played by Vin Diesel also starring Paul Walker and Jordana Brewster. In Berlin, he introduced the Wachowski Brothers (Matrix) and Rain to Jump while shooting Ninja Assassin.

But one of the things that impressed me the most was that he owned a high degree of innate creativity and self-awareness of his talents and was able to tap into it to help us formulate some really great ideas; things we would’ve never come up with!

Internally, we had developed a dossier to help us categorize our wide breadth of product. We decided that in order to make this palatable and understandable both internally and for our customers, we should categorize it. We decided that the best way to do it was to create a character or a persona for each category, then write a story about each one. Here’s what one very creative weekend yielded us.

We had a great time writing these. We wanted to make each of these characters cool but hilarious at the same time. Who would you identify with?

With these characters and Sung’s talents as an actor, we now had the tools to create some really cool stuff. But what? We began throwing ideas back and forth and came up with two really good ones. The first would be a series of short films produced by Arowana Films starring Sung playing each of the characters we’d come up with. The next would involve traveling half way around the world to Taiwan to work with my old friend Jeff Wang, owner of the creative agency, Blanq to create a collection pieces that would serve as our premier brand campaign. The stage was set for a host of exciting developments. Stay tuned.